Cartoonist Resume Example & Writing Guide
Use this Cartoonist resume example and guide to improve your career and write a powerful resume that will separate you from the competition.
If you love drawing, storytelling, and imagining new worlds, cartooning might be your calling. This creative field can encompass everything from children’s books to editorial cartoons to graphic novels.
To land your dream job as a cartoonist, you’ll need to showcase your unique talents through a resume that showcases your skills as well as your passion for the field. Here are some tips and an example resume to help you write yours.
How to Write a Cartoonist Resume
Here’s how to write a cartoonist resume of your own.
Write Compelling Bullet Points
Bullet points are the most effective way to showcase your experience and qualifications. But rather than simply listing your responsibilities, you can make your bullet points much more interesting and compelling by using specific numbers and statistics.
For example, rather than saying you “created comic strips for newspaper,” you could say you “created 10 comic strips per week for newspaper, resulting in over 1 million readers per week.”
The second bullet point is much more interesting and provides a clear sense of the scale of your work. It also provides a specific number that helps quantify your contributions.
Identify and Include Relevant Keywords
When you submit your resume for a cartoonist role, it’s likely that it will be scanned by an applicant tracking system (ATS) for certain keywords. These programs look for terms related to the job, like “graphic design” and “illustration,” in order to determine whether your skills are a match. If your resume doesn’t include enough of the right terms, the ATS might not rank it high enough to be seen by a recruiter.
To increase your chances of getting noticed, use this list of common cartoonist keywords as a starting point and then add other relevant terms that are specific to your experience:
- Caricature
- Cartooning
- Drawing
- Art
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- Computer Graphics
- Graphic Design
- Concept Art
- Storyboarding
- Comics
- Comic Books
- Visual Arts
- Illustration
- Animation
- Digital Art
- Cartoon
- Animation Production
- Advertising
- Page Layout
- Animation Storyboarding
- Storytelling
- Adobe InDesign
- Logo Design
- Sketching
- Painting
- Concept Development
- Graphic Illustration
- Branding
- Fashion
Showcase Your Technical Skills
As a cartoonist, you need to be proficient in a variety of software programs in order to create your work. Some of the most commonly used programs are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Clip Studio Paint. You should also be familiar with animation software like Adobe After Effects and Toon Boom Harmony.
In addition to software programs, you also need to be familiar with the various types of equipment used in cartooning, such as scanners, printers, and cameras.